Women’s Choices

I have to say, I hate the new Beyaz commercial with something close to a burning passion. How can a commercial for birth control, something that was a key component of the sexual revolution, be so sexist? How did the ad agency get so far off track with this one?

The premise of the commercial is women walking through a store, shopping/making choices about what they want in their lives. This should be brilliant, because birth control does, in fact, give women more choices when it comes to their lives. The main problem, in my eyes, is that each woman in the commercial only gets to choose one thing.

It starts with the line, “You know what you want to do. But you never know what you might want tomorrow. It’s good to have choices.” You see a woman grabbing a diploma from a pile labelled “graduate school.” Then two women check out a selection of pictures of men labelled “significant other.” One of the women snatches a picture out of the group just ahead of a second woman, then smirks as she walks away, leaving the second woman to look after her in disappointment and disbelief. In the next shot, the woman who missed out on the guy smiles and reaches towards a choice that we don’t get to see, but from the angle, you get the impression it is somewhere else in the store.

Then there’s a fourth woman who passes over a picnic basket labelled “picnic by waterfall.” You see her continue past a display with a stork in it. The stork, with a lavender bundle held in his beak, steps out of the display and chases her, offering the bundle repeatedly, but she smiles, refuses, and walks away. You next see her walk up to a model of the Eiffel Tower, labelled “Trip to Paris,” and take hold of the tag.

We then switch to a fifth woman, who looks at a selection of houses and cars, labelled “buy a house,” then chooses one and puts it into her shopping cart. The final scene is the woman who refused the stork, sitting behind the wheel of a car full of women with the Eiffel Tower model strapped to the roof of her car.

By the time we’re done with the commercial we have been given a slew of symbolic messages about womanhood and our choices. Right from the start, we learn that women are fickle and don’t know their own minds from day to day. Next we see that women need to fight over men, who are their only potential “significant others.” Sure, lesbians typically don’t have to worry about birth control and aren’t Beyaz’s target demographic, but there is still an assumption being made. And why emphasize sexual competition between women? Why not have both women choose a partner from among the large selection of possible mates and both be happy with their choices? Then there’s the insistence of the stork, which I can only assume refers both to a woman’s own biological clock “going off” and the pressure from her family/friends/society to get down to the business of making babies, since that’s what women are made for.

But the worst aspect of the commercial is the fact that it makes it look like you have to choose between grad school and a baby, travel and a baby, even home ownership and a baby, and the fact that a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant at a particular time in her life doesn’t have to be tied to the things she would rather be doing. Sure, having a child makes some things a little bit more difficult, but it’s not an either/or proposition any longer. I know several women who went to grad school, owned homes, and had babies all at the same time. I know multiple cultural anthropologists who took their toddlers with them to live overseas while they worked on their graduate or post-graduate research. I also know women who do not want to have a child right now regardless of the fact that they currently have a partner, own a house, and have their degree — they’re not putting off kids for the sake of something else. And I know working and stay at home moms, with and without degrees, who rent and own houses, with boyfriends, husbands, girlfriends/wives, and on their own, who have made the decision to have a child without giving anything up in the process. And whether a woman doesn’t want a child now or doesn’t want one at all, her decision to use birth control isn’t about the fact that being a mom limits her choices. It is no longer a trade off that women have to make.

I understand, many anti-teen pregnancy campaigns stress the decisions that teens need to make, and the limits that having a child can impose on young girls’ lives. But in that case, you are encouraging young girls to think about the consequences of their actions and choose one of two things: birth control, or abstinence. Beyaz is being marketed to adult women, and selling it with the message that having a child means the death of your dreams is sexist to say the least. Women today have more choices than ever — I would rather see the women in this commercial fill their symbolic shopping baskets with a variety of choices, instead of having to pick just one. We have the ability to find the combination that works best for us. And to suggest that those choices wouldn’t be possible with kids? The 1950s called, Beyaz, and they want their antiquated gender myths back.

One of the monotone facts rattled off in the background of the commercial is the fact that this birth control includes folate, which helps prevent birth defects for women who conceive while on or just after ending use of Beyaz. So that means it’s safer for women who are on birth control and accidentally or intentionally become moms. Why not emphasize the variety of reasons why women choose birth control? The message could be, if you’re not ready yet for kids, if you’ve had a child and want to wait before having more, or if you’ve finished having kids, Beyaz is the right birth control for you.